“Myth embodies the nearest approach to absolute truth that can be stated in words.” ― Ananda K. Coomaraswamy
Pieces Of Lost Continent Discovered Buried Beneath Indian Ocean
February 25, 2013
Chapter 16 Science and Myth, the hidden connection, Wolfgang Smith (2006) http://www.worldwisdom.com/uploads/pdfs/237.pdf
"It is fitting in a Memorial Lecture honoring Ananda Coomaraswamy to reflect upon the significance of Myth; for indeed, it was the Sri Lankan savant who opened our eyes to what may be termed the primacy of myth. In one of his several masterpieces—a slender book entitled Hinduism and Buddhism—Coomaraswamy begins by recounting the mythical basis of the respective traditions before turning to their doctrinal formulations. He gives us to understand that myth exceeds doctrine, somewhat as a cause exceeds an effect or the original an artistic reproduction. It is not the function of doctrine to take us out of the founding myth: to “explain it away.” On the contrary, its function is to bring us into the myth; for indeed, the pearl of truth resides in myth as in a sanctuary. Authentic doctrine can take us to the threshold of that sanctuary; but like Moses before the Promised Land, it cannot enter there. Not all doctrine, however, is sacred, and it turns out that atheists and iconoclasts have myths of their own. Not only the wise, but fools also live ultimately by myth; it is only that the respective myths are by no means the same. My first objective will be to exhibit the mythical basis of modern science. In particular, I shall discuss three major scientific myths (generally referred to as “paradigms”): the Newtonian, the Darwinian, and the Copernican. My second objective will be to contrast the myths of Science with the myths of Tradition."
Brett Smith for redOrbit.com – Your Universe Online
Tales of submerged or ‘lost’ areas of land have been prevalent in popular culture since the days of Plato. Yet, while we never found the lost city of Atlantis, an international group of scientists has found evidence of an ancient micro-continent resting beneath two islands in the Indian Ocean.
Until around 750 million years ago, all of the dry land on Earth was collected into a single continent called Rodinia, the older supercontinent counterpart to the more well-known Pangaea. The supercontinent was driven apart by tectonic forces, slowly fragmenting and drifting apart some 750 million years ago.
New evidence suggests at least one landmass got lost in this continental ballet that occurred millions of years before the emergence of man. According to a new report in Nature Geoscience, a strip of land, which scientists have dubbed Mauritia, linked the landmasses that would later become modern day India and Madagascar between 2,000 and 85 million years ago.
The team of British, Norwegian, South African and German scientists made this discovery while studying grains of sand from the beaches of Mauritius, a tiny yet popular tropical island in the Indian Ocean. Using lead-uranium dating techniques, the team was able to date the grains back to a volcanic eruption that occurred around nine million years ago, yet they contained minerals that were between roughly 600 million and 2 billion years old.
“We found zircons that we extracted from the beach sands, and these are something you typically find in a continental crust,” co-author Trond Torsvik of the University of Oslo, Norway told BBC News. “They are very old in age.”
After a recalculation of geohistorical plate tectonics, the team was able to explain how and where the fragments ended up on Mauritius. They said that large plumes of magma rise from deep within the Earth and soften the tectonic plates from below until the plates break apart at the hotspots.
“On the one hand, it shows the position of the plates relative to the two hotspots at the time of the rupture, which points towards a causal relation,” said Bernhard Steinberger of the GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences in Potsdam, who also co-authored the report. “On the other hand, we were able to show that the continent fragments continued to wander almost exactly over the Reunion plume, which explains how they were covered by volcanic rock.”
Torsvik said that pieces of Mauritia might be located about 6 miles beneath the Indian Ocean and around Mauritius. About 85 million years ago, the microcontinent broke up and eventually disappeared beneath the waves.
“But once upon a time, it was sitting north of Madagascar,” Torsvik noted. “And what we are saying is that maybe this was much bigger, and there are many of these continental fragments that are spread around in the ocean.”
“We need seismic data which can image the structure,” Torsvik said. “Or you can drill deep, but that would cost a lot of money.” He says that future studies of the area will be focused on finding out more details about the lost landmass.
Source: Brett Smith for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online
http://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112790748/pieces-of-lost-continent-found-022513/
A Precambrian microcontinent in the Indian Ocean
- Nature Geoscience
- 6,
- 223–227
- (2013)
- doi:10.1038/ngeo1736
- Received
- 10 August 2012
- Accepted
- 18 January 2013
- Published online
- 24 February 2013
The Laccadive–Chagos Ridge and Southern Mascarene Plateau in the north-central and western Indian Ocean, respectively, are thought to be volcanic chains formed above the Réunion mantle plume1 over the past 65.5 million years2, 3. Here we use U–Pb dating to analyse the ages of zircon xenocrysts found within young lavas on the island of Mauritius, part of the Southern Mascarene Plateau. We find that the zircons are either Palaeoproterozoic (more than 1,971 million years old) or Neoproterozoic (between 660 and 840 million years old). We propose that the zircons were assimilated from ancient fragments of continental lithosphere beneath Mauritius, and were brought to the surface by plume-related lavas. We use gravity data inversion to map crustal thickness and find that Mauritius forms part of a contiguous block of anomalously thick crust that extends in an arc northwards to the Seychelles. Using plate tectonic reconstructions, we show that Mauritius and the adjacent Mascarene Plateau may overlie a Precambrian microcontinent that we call Mauritia. On the basis of reinterpretation of marine geophysical data4, we propose that Mauritia was separated from Madagascar and fragmented into a ribbon-like configuration by a series of mid-ocean ridge jumps during the opening of the Mascarene ocean basin between 83.5 and 61 million years ago. We suggest that the plume-related magmatic deposits have since covered Mauritia and potentially other continental fragments.
Circled numbers denote times (Myr) when the Réunion plume26 was beneath or near the Indian (red circle) or African plates. Triangles denote dated sites (see also inset map for ages). The red line is the 1% slow contour in the SMEAN mode…Figure 1: Crustal thickness map based on gravity inversion and the Réunion hotspot chain.
Figure 2: U–Pb concordia diagram. Data are shown with 2σ error ellipses (Supplementary Table S1) surrounded by yellow circles. Corresponding zircon grains are shown in microscope view before analysis. The two largest grains, which give concordant to nearly concordant re…
Figure 3: Late Cretaceous to Eocene plate reconstructions. Mantle reference frame26 with surface location for Réunion (R) and Marion (Ma) hotspots. Mean plate speeds calculated for India (IND) and Africa (AFR). a, During the opening of the Mascarene Basin (83.5–70 Myr BP), Mauritius (M) and par…
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n3/full/ngeo1736.html
Plate tectonics: Calling card of a ghost continent
- Nature Geoscience
- 6,
- 165–166
- (2013)
- doi:10.1038/ngeo1748
- Published online
- 27 February 2013
Where continents break apart, new ocean basins are formed. The discovery of ancient continental minerals on a young, volcanic island suggests that parts of the Indian Ocean floor may be underlain by fragments of a long-lost continent.
http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/v6/n3/full/ngeo1748.html